greentheoryandpraxisjournal.orggreentheoryandpraxisjournal.org/.../2018/...Issue-3-November-2018.docx · Web viewDakota word for Minnesota. Peta Wakan Tipi – Sacred Fire Lodge/House

Vol. 11, Issue 3November 2018

Volume 11, Issue 3, November 2018 Page 1

Green Theory & Praxis Journal ISSN: 1941-0948

Vol. 11, Issue 3November 2018

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Editor:Erik JuergensmeyerFort Lewis College

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Table of Contents

ARTICLE

Dream of Wild Health: Growing Garden Warriors and a Food Sovereignty Movement Roxanne Gould .……………………………………………..…………….….……………..……3



Vol. 11, Issue 3November, 2018

Dream of Wild Health: Growing Garden Warriors and a Food Sovereignty Movement

Author: Roxanne GouldTitle: Assistant Professor of Indigenous EducationAffiliation: University of Minnesota-DuluthLocation: Duluth, MN, USAEmail: [email protected]

Keywords: Indigenous, Food, Sovereignty

AbstractExamined through a lens of Critical Indigenous Pedagogy of Place (CIPP), this case study focuses on the intimate relationship Indigenous peoples had with their environment prior to colonization, the devastating impact of colonization, the importance of food sovereignty, and the passing of knowledge to future generations. An Indigenous informal education project, Dream of Wild Health (DWH), and its Garden Warrior youth program serve as a model for food sovereignty and engaging Indigenous youth with place.

VocabularyAwakaanag – Domesticated or enslaved animals and plants (Ojibwe)Awensiinhag – Wild or free animals and plants (Ojibwe)Maka Ina – Mother Earth (Dakota)Mitakuye owasin – All my relations (Dakota)


mailto:[email protected]


Mnisota Mokoche – Land where the water reflects the clouds. Dakota word for Minnesota.Peta Wakan Tipi – Sacred Fire Lodge/House (Dakota)Spirit Dish - A dish of food set out for the ancestorsTalking Circle – Native group practice of sitting in a circle with a talking piece to give each person an opportunity to speak and everyone a chance to listen

Introduction Creating food scarcity has long been a tool of repression for colonizing governments to pacify Indigenous populations. After 200 years of a shrinking homeland as a result of settler invasion, the Dakota of Mnisota Makoche (Minnesota) were forced into a state of dependency on the US federal government for food and money. When the US government reneged on its treaty obligations and exterminated millions of buffalo, it put the Dakota in a position of impending starvation (Waziyatawin, 2012; Upstrand, 2012):

Hunger was widespread throughout Dakota lands in Minnesota. Since crops had been poor in 1861, the Dakota had little food stored for the “starving winter” of 1861-62. Their reservation supported no game, and increasing settlement off the reservation meant more competition with Euro-Americans also hunting for meat. Reports about government agents’ corrupt treatment of the Dakota were ignored. (Minnesota Historical Society)

The Dakota felt they had no other recourse but to go to war in 1862, the only war they ever waged against the US government. “Our ancestors who found their daily sustenance from the land, forests and waters understood that their survival was directly dependent on their capacity to defend their homelands” (Waziyatawin, 2012, p. 71). In an interview with Dakota elder and first-language speaker Clifford Canku, he states,

My personal idea is that we are a peaceful people, but at the same time, when people are being forced and pushed into a corner, it is the warrior’s duty to protect the people, and they didn’t shun their duties. They had no recourse, they were doing these things to us as people, and they had to do something about it, and that’s what they did. (Rose, 2013)

This gave Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey the leverage to ethnically cleanse Dakota peoples from the state, by calling for their exile or complete extermination, which was accomplished through murder, incarceration, internment, and starvation (Waziyatawin, 2008). According to Wallensteen (1976),

The aim of a military weapon is to kill. This is done by cutting a throat or blowing a person to bits. The economic weapon cannot achieve such direct killing…however…denying access to food, life can be threatened. If effectively applied, economic commodities can be as disastrous to human life as military weapons. (p. 277)

Ultimately, it was starvation that weakened the Dakota, allowing the colonial government to legislate and eradicate the Dakota and take the last of their homeland.



Prior to settler colonialism, Mnisota Makoche was a land of great abundance that provided perfectly for her Native American inhabitants. This abundance plus thousands of years of sustainable practices allowed the Dakota to live long, healthy lives. Although Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas relied on hunting and gathering to maintain their health, they also cultivated more than 300 food crops, which comprise about three fifths of the food crops now cultivated in the world (Waziyatawin & Yellowbird, 2012).

Today only 10% of the Dakota live in their homeland of Mnisota Makoce. Since the exile and land grab of 1862, the Dakota diaspora has struggled with hunger, poverty, and poor health. Waziyatawin and Yellowbird (2012) argue, “Our colonizers taught us to believe that our health has improved because of Western medicine, Western foods, and Western technology. These are all lies” (p. 67).

Critical Indigenous Pedagogy of PlaceThe very word “indigenous” is derived from the Latin root indu or endo, which in turn is related to the Greek word endina, which means “entrails.” “Indigenous” means being so completely identified with a place that you reflect its very entrails, its insides, its soul. (Cajete, 1999, p. 4)

Although there is much diversity among Indigenous populations of Turtle Island, the perspective and practice they hold in common is that they are people of place. According to Cajete (1999), Indigenous people have always understood that “the universe was never separated from other sacred knowledge” and “was built upon constructive and co-operative relationships that had to be maintained, with a relationship of reciprocity, humility and respect” (p. 23). He mentions a phrase in his language that translates as “that place that the People talk about,” referring not only to a “physical place but also [to] a place of consciousness and an orientation to sacred ecology” (p. 3).

Kimmerer (2013) explains that in the Indigenous world, the well-being of one is linked to the well-being of all. Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away. Hoarding the gift, we become constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance. (p. 381)

Rather, a system of reciprocity existed to ensure balance, and life was maintained with all of one’s relations and all of creation. Mitakuye owasin is a phrase used by the Dakota people of Mnisota Makoche before speaking or after prayer to acknowledge the reciprocity of and deep connection to all my relations. This includes not only family and human relationships but the relationship to all of creation.

Although these Indigenous traditions of reciprocity kept Mnisota Makoche beautiful, healthy, and abundant in the past, much of the landscape has changed. The violence that was perpetrated against the Dakotas has also been carried out upon the land, depleting it of much of its vitality



with the loss of 98% of Minnesota’s white pines, 90% of the wetlands, 98% of the Big Woods of southern Minnesota, and 99% of the prairies (Waziyatawin, 2012). Because of the changes and collisions in values and worldviews brought by settler colonialism, all of Turtle Island has been impacted. Nelson (2008) explains:

Water, air, land, energy, and the seed are facing serious challenges in their cycles to sustain the regeneration of life. The loss of respect for life and its sacredness are reflected in the unsustainable type of development carried out by the colonizers and neo-colonizers throughout the last five hundred years. (p. 299)

It is therefore imperative that if the citizens of Maka Ina (Mother Earth) and Mnisota Makoche are going to create a movement that will restore the health of the land and food system, it must include a Critical Pedagogy of Place (CPP), which allows for the interrogation of colonization, capitalism, and globalization as the basis of our planetary crisis. As Jay T. Johnson explains, “To understand the place-based struggles of Indigenous communities, engagement requires pedagogies created by that place; the experiences, problems, languages and histories these communities rely upon to construct a narrative of collective identity” (Johnson, 2012, p. 834).

Therefore, a Critical Indigenous Pedagogy of Place (CIPP), according to Trinidad (2012), requires a responsive participatory and community decision-making process that allows for a critique of the social power of the dominant ideology that keeps Indigenous communities vulnerable. Although CIPP builds upon the work of CPP, CPP does not place Indigenous issues and ways of knowing at the forefront. Since the Indigenous population of the United States is a small percentage (0.09%) of the overall population, well-meaning movements often end up pushing Indigenous peoples to the background, drowning out Indigenous voices with other concerns.

The two tenets of Critical Pedagogy of Place, according to Gruenwald (2003), are to identify, recover, and create spaces and places that teach us how to live well (reinhabitation) and to identify and change ways of thinking that injure and exploit people and places (decolonization). This is important to Indigenous movements, but Indigenous scholars argue that there is not a universal idea of decolonization and Gruenwald’s underlying principle of reinhabitation must go further to address the issues of Indigenous sovereignty and repatriation. Without further discourse, it runs the risk of recolonization that reinforces those power structures it attempted to dismantle (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Waziyatawin, 2012; Harasymchuk, 2015; Bowers, 2008).

With CIPP, Indigenous epistemology is in the forefront while promoting “a community-based process that sheds light on locally-grounded solutions aimed for sustainability” (Trinidad et al., 2012). Critical Pedagogy of Place, according to Gruenwald (2003), allows for culture to enter the discussion of ecological politics and place-based discourse, but CIPP insists upon Indigenous culture being core and central (p. 11).



Nonetheless, CPP has produced scholarship important to this discussion that should be included in CIPP, such as Gruenwald’s assertion that this movement cannot only be about struggles with human oppression (2003). He urges, “It also must embrace the experience of being human in connection with the others and with the world of nature, and the responsibility to conserve and restore our shared environments for future generations” (p. 314).

Dream of Wild Health is one project that accomplishes this mission.

Dream of Wild HealthDream of Wild Health (DWH), originally called Peta Wakan Tipi (Sacred Fire Lodge), is an intertribal nonprofit created in 1986 and is one of the longest-standing Native organizations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The original goal of Peta Wakan Tipi was to facilitate the healing of Native American women and their children by reconnecting them to the land and to place. As Peta Wakan Tipi became and was renamed Dream of Wild Health, the mission statement that emerged was to restore health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of, and access to, healthy Indigenous foods, medicines, and lifeways.

Dream of Wild Health is now a 10-acre farm in Hugo, MN, that provides educational programming to reconnect the urban Native American community to the culinary, medicinal, and spiritual uses of traditional Native plants. During the summer, DWH not only grows garden produce but also Garden Warriors, an informal education program for Native youth ages 13 to 18. The Garden Warriors receive a stipend while being taught gardening, cooking, culture, and job and leadership skills. Garden Warriors who demonstrate maturity, leadership, and commitment to succeeding in school are invited to join a year-round Youth Leaders group with a focus on nutrition, health, food-justice, and traditional Native relationship to the land. https://dreamofwildhealth.org In keeping with akichita (warrior) traditions, Garden Warriors are taught to care for their bodies, minds, and spirits so they are strong and ready to care for their families, communities, and Maka Ina.

Ernie Whiteman (Arapaho) and Hope Flanagan (Seneca) are elders and cultural teachers at DWH. They start each day with circle, offering a blessing and setting the intentions for the day. Ernie teaches the youth about the circle. He states, “I start out very basic; the moon, the planets, the seasons, our lives…everything we do and is a circle. It’s cyclical. This concept is connected to what we do here at the far” (personal communication, June 2017). He and Hope teach about the responsibility the Garden Warriors have to each other, the plants, and the community. They teach the Garden Warriors about the traditional use of tobacco, how it is offered during prayer, and how it is used when planting or harvesting. The proper use of tobacco is an important part of reciprocity; when one asks for something, one must give something in return. Since growing tobacco is culturally a male responsibility, Ernie works with the young men in the tobacco garden, teaching them their obligations to Native society and that tobacco is a sacred medicine.

Hope is also the wild plant coordinator for Dream of Wild Health and teaches the Garden Warriors traditional gathering practices, stories, language, and issues related to eating genetically modified foods. As a fluent speaker of Ojibwe, Hope explains the Ojibwe words for the



awensiinhag, or wild ones/plants, and the awakaanag, the enslaved ones/plants. She teaches that these words are mostly used for animals but can also apply to plants.

I was told by my namesake many years ago that I should eat the awensiinhag because that is what my spirit needs and what a good teaching that was because it kept me from ingesting genetically modified foods. The animals know better than us when something looks like its food but is not really food. (Personal communication, June, 2017)

Estella LaPointe (Nakota/Lakota/Dakota) coordinates the Garden Warriors program. She explains,

As Native people, a lot of us have forgotten because we live in cement. I come from a place where I have seen miracles happen before my eyes. I try to tell the young ones this. There is no better way to be, than to be who we are! We respect them. We knew that our children were sacred, precious and our greatest gift. They were beloved children. I am trying to bring that back where we treat our children like that. When you treat them as precious, they blossom. They have no reason to choose the wrong path. I have seen it as life in death in this work. It’s really healing to come out here to the farm. (Personal communication, June 2017)

Methodology and FindingsThis study is a qualitative case study using Indigenous research methodologies (Kovach, 2010) to inform the research process. The staff of DWH are very protective of the youth and wanted to insure the research process used would protect the youth and would bring needed insight to their work with the youth. As an Indigenous researcher, I also wanted to accomplish those goals. I live in the community this program serves and have had a relationship with this program on many different levels.

After spending extensive time with the staff and board members, I wanted to know how the youth who participated in the Dream of Wild Health programs felt about their experience, whether it influenced changes in their behavior and thinking about themselves and their relationship with food, family, culture, land, and community. The staff were also interested in this information.

The quantitative data from the annual exit surveys filled out by the Garden Warriors reveals how many are meeting the goals of the program by learning gardening, cooking, culture, and job and leadership skills. But the qualitative data from the survey comments and closing Talking Circle provide a much richer insight into the impact of the Garden Warrior experience. According to Kovach (2010) the act of sitting in a circle to as a collective means of knowledge gathering is familiar, based on cultural knowledge and has been often adapted as a research method in contemporary settings. The data gathered from these two sources reveals that Garden Warriors are thinking deeply and critically about their relationships to food, nature, culture, community, family, and their bodies. The exit surveys also reveal that Garden Warriors are changing practices and behaviors in their lives to accommodate their new knowledge and beliefs.



After examining three years of feedback and looking for themes from the Garden Warriors exit surveys and Talking Circles, the impact of the program is evident. In 2015-2017, 82 participants, with an average age of 15 years old, reported the top three things they learned from the Garden Warriors Program:

- 70% reported cultural practices, traditions, and language- 65% reported cooking and eating healthy- 55% reported gardening or learning about plants

Comments Related to Things the Garden Warriors Learned- Learned traditional ways. - The effects of GMO and processed foods on your body, language, harvesting food. - How to play [Native] women’s games better.- More about my Ojibwe language. - About history so we can make things better. - How to treat sickness.- If you have a cut or something, and walking in the wild, I know to put plantain on the cut. - How to forage, cooking and making new food.- Getting to know more Native youth and their strengths. - About agriculture, improving teamwork. - To socialize better.- Indigenous seeds and how to use them. - Learning how to cook, work and social skills.- The different types and uses of plants (medicine, food, utility). - Helping at the farm more, job skills, how to garden, live healthy.- About culture.

Garden Warriors Reported Doing the Following Differently since Coming to Dream of Wild Health- Cooking more often. - Putting tobacco down twice a day, being more appreciative. - Eating healthier and working out more.- How to can and preserve food, cook healthy, plant and garden.- Being more conscious of what I eat/about pollinators.- I will always remember everything I did like job skills, cooking, and most of all respect.- I’m more confident speaking out loud.- I now know how to find Indigenous foods. - I get to learn a lot about my culture that I never knew previously, meet new people and make new friends, create healthy relationships.- It taught me to be a better person. - Made me feel more connected and open to my community.



- Helping each other out.- I became wiser and feel like I need to share some of my knowledge with my family. - Things we cook here, we cook at home with my mom for everyone, like the sautéed zucchini, the kale strawberry salad and everyone liked it. - Makes me respect my body more, & understand how important everything and everybody is.- Smudge when I need a change or cleaning.- Set out Spirit dish. - Introduction speech when presenting.

How Does Being a Part of DWH Change You or Make You Healthy?

- DWH has fresh, healthy food.- It made me conscious about what I eat.- If you want to be healthy, you always have support here.- It gives us easy access to foods we didn’t know existed before coming here. - It’s good we get to learn how to prepare foods, and how to make healthy foods taste good. - We’re surrounded by healthy people.- It’s so cool to see Heather [farm manager]. She’s so passionate and excited about healthy food, it makes me excited and want to be like her. All the staff here are passionate like that.- It’s a nonprofit farm, and we grow non-GMO foods which makes it unique.- I’ve learned to respect my body more, I want to grow to be old – an elder.

Each year about 60% of the Garden Warriors return to participate in another year of programing at Dream of Wild Health. Although Garden Warriors is a youth program, 100% of their families also participate in the program by taking cooking classes, attending the feasts, helping at the farm, and sharing their knowledge. In addition, many of the families purchase foods from Dream of Wild Health at the farmer’s market or participate in the Indigenous Food Share program. Dream of Wild Health also provides college scholarships to those outstanding Garden Warriors who become Youth Leaders. DWH delivered excess produce to elders, food banks, and the Standing Rock Reservation in 2016 during the struggle to protect the water and land from the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Youth leaders and Garden Warriors have also supported the struggle for clean water and land (Estes, 2017; Levin, 2016; Whyte, 2017). Like the warriors of the past, the Garden Warriors not only care for themselves but also others.

DWH Seed SavingAnother project that is part of Dream of Wild Health and important to the work of the Garden Warriors is the seed saving program. In 2000, a letter came to Dream of Wild Health from Cora Baker, a Potawatomi elder, master gardener, and keeper of ancient seeds from Wisconsin. Five months before she passed away, Cora wrote,



I had prayed and prayed that someone would take this gardening up again. I am very pleased to learn about your project. I feel that the Great Creator has answered my humble prayers. With the help of my great granddaughter and grandson, we set out to help you. I wish that someday the children will come to realize the importance of the garden.

With help from her great-granddaughter, Cora sent many different varieties of corn, beans, and squash, plus several sunflower varieties, Indigenous tobacco, and different plant medicines to Dream of Wild Health.

Once the word spread about Dream of Wild Health, more seeds began arriving in the mail from many different sources. Some came knotted up in a handkerchief, with a note saying, “My grandmother wanted you to have these.” Another family donated Cherokee corn seeds that were carried on the original Trail of Tears (Dream of Wild Health, “Seed Collection”).

According to LaDuke (2004), seeds are the foundation of agriculture, of biodiversity, and indeed life (p. 17). As of today, Dream of Wild Health has more than 100 different varieties of seeds saved in their collection. According to Frank Haney, former farm manager for DWH, some of the seeds have been tested at the University of Minnesota and have been found to have significantly more nutritional value then their genetically modified counterparts (personal conversation, May 2014).

According to the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network, Indigenous seeds are a vibrant and vital foundation for food sovereignty.

Food SovereigntyEach year Dream of Wild Health produces approximately six tons of organic and traditional Native foods on less than two acres of land using only compost. The farm and food DWH produces are used to teach Native youth and their families how they can feed themselves and their communities, although Indigenous food sovereignty is about more than food security.

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. (Nyéléni, 2007; Patel, 2009)

For thousands of years prior to colonization, the Indigenous peoples of Mnisota Makoche had secured both political and food sovereignty. Like other Indigenous peoples, they had learned how to hunt, gather, and grow foods within their territory to feed their nations. These foods didn’t merely fill stomachs but provided complete and healthy nutrition. According to Cajete (1999),



Analysis of hunter-gatherer diets shows an average fiber content of forty-six grams [daily], eight to ten times that of the modern diet. The calcium content of sixteen hundred milligrams is at least twice as great; this figure is calculated from plant foods and animal flesh consumed, and does not reflect bones eaten (parts certainly were). The sodium intake was only one-sixth that of ours, while protein intake was at least twice today’s average. Trace-mineral content was high. Less fat is consumed on a hunter-fisher-gatherer diet. Concentrated vegetable oils are unknown. (p. 51)

Stories of Dakota elders of the past often told of long, healthy lives, with death being brought on only by old age or, as some say in jest, “run over by a buffalo.” In other words, their lives were not shortened by the diseases that plague Native nations today because of unhealthy practices and foods. Indigenous peoples had diverse, healthy, organic diets. According to Shiva (2014),

Humanity has consumed more than 80,000 edible plants throughout its evolution; more than 3,000 have been used consistently…we now rely on just eight crops to provide 75 per cent of the world’s food, and with genetic engineering, production has narrowed down to three crops – corn, soya, canola. Monocultures are destroying biodiversity, our health, and the quality and diversity of food. They have been promoted as an essential component of industrial and globalized agriculture; they create pseudo surpluses and real scarcity by destroying biodiversity, local food systems and food cultures. (pp. 198-199)

In addition to industrialization and globalization, colonial policies and practices of genocide, land theft, allotment, boarding schools, assimilation, and relocation have contributed to the decline in Indigenous health. These policies and practices are directly responsible for the large percentage of Indigenous peoples moving or being pushed from rural into urban areas. As a result of this change, few Native Americans hunt, gather, or farm today and are becoming increasingly sedentary (Cajete, 1999). The outcome of dietary and lifestyle changes is that Indigenous peoples in the United States now have some of the highest rates of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer in the world. According to Dream of Wild Health,

Disease patterns among Indian people are strongly associated with adverse consequences from poverty, limited access to health services and cultural dislocation. The changes in diet forced on Native people by relocation to reservations combined with dependence on unhealthy commodity foods have had a lasting impact.… The death rate from diabetes for Native Americans in Minnesota is almost four times higher than the rate for Whites. (Dream of Wild Health, “Diabetes Prevention”)

Eating is an intimate act that can literally nourish, sicken, or even kill, according to Nelson (2008). It is therefore imperative that Indigenous peoples and nations have critical conversations about their ancestral connection to land, their food, and how Indigenous nations can achieve the level of health and sovereignty they once had. LaDuke (2013) asks, “If we cannot feed ourselves, how can we call ourselves sovereign?”



Critical Indigenous Pedagogy of Place can be a useful tool to create a social movement that eradicates food insecurity (Trinidad et al., 2016, p. 8). The Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative (2015) suggests creating a tribal food system that is an interconnected web of people, culture, politics, law, and economics that allows for a particular tribal community to provide food for all members. By thinking of ourselves and our foods as a part of a system, it “reminds us of a common humanity and encourages better environmental stewardship” (p. 5). The traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) Indigenous people developed and relied upon over thousands of years is based on the belief that humans were not just stewards of nature, but part of it. They relied on knowledge their ancestors developed as a result of their relationship to place and their food systems. Although Indigenous peoples had vast systems of trade, most of their food came from the territory in which they lived.

According to Kahn (2008), approximately 1.2 billion people today live on less than $1 per day. Another 3 billion live on less than $2 per day. For Indigenous peoples, who are often the miners’ canaries of a society, it has been especially torturous, creating mass hunger and displacement (p. 3). In Mnisota Makoche, 36% of the Native American population live in poverty, which causes food insecurity in families who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which does not provide them with enough to get them through the month (Minnesota Department of Health).

Restoring and reclaiming Indigenous places and food practices, traditional ecological knowledge, and new knowledge of how to grow food in the midst of a changing climate will offer Native communities a path to greater food sovereignty.

Recommendations for Further StudyThe purpose of this study was to look at the impact Dream of Wild Health has on the Native American youth that participate in the Garden Warrior program. The study revealed that the program has an immediate impact on the youths’ behavior, knowledge, and practices, but this research question could benefit from a longitudinal study to access the impact of the program on the participants over 5, 10, or 20 years after they exit the Garden Warriors program.

Although direct teaching about social justice issues didn’t seem to be readily visible, Trinidad (2012) suggests that a process such as the one DWH uses to engage youth with elders is a powerful tool for increasing critical consciousness and a sense of agency in working toward social change and a stronger sense of place (Lowan-Trudeau, 2017). It would be the recommendation of this researcher that DWH capture, record and archive stories about the interactions and the impact they have on the youth as well as the elders.

Dream of Wild Health is a longstanding, well -espected Native American program in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metro area. It will continue to be of interest to researchers. Although this researcher was interviewed and vetted prior to DWH staff approval, it would be my recommendation that DWH develop research protocols as other Native nations and programs have done. This would ensure they would protect their people and research subjects and have



some control over the research project that come knocking on their doorstep to ensure it will benefit DWH.

ConclusionsIndigenous food programs are developing throughout the country in both rural and urban areas. Programs such as Dream of Wild Health have extensive networks that go far beyond the borders of Mnisota Makoche. When grounded in a Critical Indigenous Pedagogy of Place, these organizations can motivate youth and families to learn about their cultures, histories, collective values, and healing practices to become change agents, thus creating a new generation of warriors who care for themselves and their communities (Trinidad et al., 2016, p. 2). These programs and projects are not only reinhabiting and restoring the health of Indigenous homelands, they are also challenging historical injustices that contributed to the destruction of Indigenous political and food sovereignty. They are raising a new generation of warriors committed to challenging mainstream ideologies that support extractionist economies, big corporate agriculture, and predatory capitalism, all of which are contributing to the destruction of the planet.

There is hope, but the battle is not won. Settler colonialism continues to push Indigenous peoples to the margins of society, rendering them invisible, but programs like DWH’s Garden Warriors assert that Indigenous youth are sacred and beloved human beings capable of changing their world (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

In addition, the fight for Maka Ina and our food systems is dire, needing not only Indigenous warriors but others to join in the fight for life. Wildcat (2010) argues that as Natives, “the inalienable responsibilities we are born with require us to act, lest the Earth, our mother, and all of her children remember us as the people who forgot their relations and relatives” (p. 133).

Indigenous elders remind us that if we are to succeed in this fight for our homelands and Maka Ina, we must return to a moral covenant of reciprocity that

calls us to honor our responsibilities for all we have been given, for all that we have taken.… Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. In return for the privilege of breath. (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 384)

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Documents

greentheoryandpraxisjournal.orggreentheoryandpraxisjournal.org/.../2018/...Issue-3-November-2018.docx · Web viewDakota word for Minnesota. Peta Wakan Tipi – Sacred Fire Lodge/House